Virginia Mayo
January 17th, 2005 by Andre Soares
Actress Virginia Mayo, 84, died today at a nursing home in the Los Angeles suburb of Thousand Oaks. Mayo had been in poor health since contracting pneumonia a year ago.
Beginning her career as a chorus girl, the honey-blonde Virginia Mayo soon became one of the leading exponents of Technicolored female beauty of the 1940s and 1950s. Never a great actress, she was always good to look at. Among her films are The Princess and the Pirate (1944) with Bob Hope, Wonder Man (1945) with Danny Kaye (with whom she made three more movies for producer Samuel Goldwyn), The Flame and the Arrow (1950) with Burt Lancaster, Captain Horatio Hornblower R.N. (1951) with Gregory Peck, and King Richard and the Crusaders (1954) with Rex Harrison.
Her two best films, however, were in black and white: Goldwyn’s Academy Award winner The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), in which she plays war vet Dana Andrews’s selfish wife (she is the one who doesn’t — foolishly, we may add — want to spend the best years of her life with him) and the tough, totally psychotic crime thriller White Heat (1949), directed by Raoul Walsh and starring James Cagney.
Mayo’s career petered out in the late 1950s, but she continued working sporadically throughout the following decades. Her last film was The Man Next Door (1997).
Her marriage to actor Michael O’Shea lasted from 1947 until his death in 1973.
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